Arena of Valor Failure Makes Tencent rethink about its Overseas Strategy

Wrong steps in development and marketing are the reasons behind the game’s downfall. Like Tencent’s US-based Riot Games subsidiary, has seen the international version, called Arena of Valor, flop in Europe and North America.

Tencent Holdings made its first overseas with an adaptation of its blockbuster mobile game Honour of Kings in the summer of 2017. .Executives thought they had a success on their hands.

The multi-player role-playing game had 55 million daily active users in China. The game marks as company’s top game and gives roughly $145 million a month,

The game has just 100,000 daily active users in Europe and 150,000 in North America.

But the failure of Arena of Valor raises questions about Tencent’s international market. Tencent lacked distribution and experience in user demographics as they don’t know how to compete – said IHS Markit games analyst Cui Chenyu.

The company drew one-third of its $85.5 billion in revenue last quarter from videogames.

Trouble came for Tencent in its marketing plans for Arena of Valor.

Its homegrown games operation had a strained relationship with US unit Riot. According to Riot’s employees, Honour of Kings and knock-off of Riot’s League of Legends are the world’s most popular desktop-based games.

One blunder was the idea of replacing the Honour of Kings characters like Batman and Superman against Chinese culture.

Tencent also realised later that hardcore gamers in the West prefer desktop-based games as many consumers from Europe and the United States did not have 4G internet.

The popularity of Honour of Kings also shows much to its vast community with players connected by Tencent’s WeChat and QQ platforms.

Tencent outsourced the marketing and operation of the game to Southeast Asia to Sea.

Michael Kyaw

Michael Kyaw, initially a PR Manager, built up a valuable network of connections in the sports world that he then utilized to become an influential sports business reporter. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, Fansided, ESPN and the Wall Street Journal.